Crackdown on credit card ruse

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Most of the Government’s proposals for cracking down on the credit card industry’s less-than-lovely practices look reasonable. In particular, it is right to take an axe to the “order of payments” dodge, which means that customer repayments are applied to their cheapest debt first and the most expensive last.

This is the dark wheeze that lies at the heart of many credit card companies’ business models.

It allows them to offer a barrage of “teaser” introductory offers, confident they will be more than compensated as a big minority of customers are trapped paying off the highest-interest debt for years and

It is understandable that the construction of an air-polluting,
noise-blighting £22 billion third runway to turn Heathrow into the world’s
pre-eminent superhub caught the eye, but the Davies report into airport
expansion also made another radical suggestion: that — third runway or not —
Heathrow should start acting like the UK hub that it pretends to be